In every way, Gordon Brown has turned out to be the wrong man at the wrong time:
A settled view, among the electorate as well as the commentariat has formed, one that will take an earthquake to shake. I can see its distortions and exaggerations and yet, no matter how much I would like to, I cannot depart from the substance of it. I find myself in sympathy with those who admired Brown through his 10 long years as chancellor and who keenly awaited his premiership, and yet now conclude that they got Brown wrong – that, on the current evidence, he is simply not up to the job.
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Even the prime minister’s closest allies say what has happened these past 12 months is “tragic”. It would take a Shakespeare to do justice to a story that combines the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth and the indecision of Hamlet.
By all accounts, Brown is a terrible politician. He can’t give a speech, he can’t fake a smile, even his principled moves seem opportunistic. And obviously, there is a perfect storm effect as Brown’s terribleness compounds the effects of the inevitable post-Blair hangover. The question is how the responsibility should be divvied up: Was failure inevitable, or if Brown were a political prodigy, could he have maneuvered out of the post-Blair morass and been a success? The question moots itself; some counterfactuals are just not useful because they diverge too far from reality, and in this case the Brown-Blair association cannot be hypothetically sundered without rewriting much of the past decade’s history. In other words, if Brown were a more talented politician, he wouldn’t have played the dutiful yet seething understudy for so long. His political failure is the legacy of place, time, and temperament.
